Each of the test cars driving around Detroit contains onboard equipment that collects, stores, and transmits weather data. In the future, such onboard equipment will be much smaller and integrated into the car design instead of taking up trunk space. (Credit: Copyright UCAR, photo by Michael Chapman)

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are testing an innovative technological system in the Detroit area this month that ultimately will help protect drivers from being surprised by black ice, fog, and other hazardous weather conditions.

The prototype system is designed to gather detailed information about weather and road conditions from moving vehicles. Within about a decade, it should enable motor vehicles equipped with wireless technology to transmit automated updates about local conditions to a central database, which will then relay alerts to other drivers in the area.

“The goal is to reduce crashes, injuries, and deaths by getting drivers the information they need about nearby hazards,” says Sheldon Drobot, the NCAR program manager in charge of the project. “The system will tell drivers what they can expect to run into in the next few seconds and minutes, giving them a critical chance to slow down or take other action.”

NCAR’s road weather system is part of IntelliDrive(SM), a national initiative overseen by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to use new technologies to make driving safer and improve mobility. Officials envision that, over the next 10 years or so, motor vehicles will begin to automatically communicate with each other and central databases, alerting drivers to threats that range from adverse road conditions to nearby vehicles that are moving erratically or are running through a red light. The goal of the DOT is to reduce motor vehicle accidents by 90 percent by 2030.

The national program brings together federal and state transportation officials, motor vehicle manufacturers, engineering and planning firms, consumer electronics companies, and others.

An estimated 1.5 million motor vehicle accidents annually are associated with poor weather, resulting in about 7,400 deaths and 690,000 injuries, according to a 2004 National Research Council report, “Where the Weather Meets the Road.” The report called for improving safety by establishing a nationwide observation system to monitor weather conditions along roads and warn drivers about potential hazards.

For the road weather portion of IntelliDrive, vehicles will use sensors to measure atmospheric conditions such as temperature, pressure, and humidity. An onboard digital memory device will record that information, along with indirect signs of road conditions, such as windshield wipers being switched on or activation of the antilock braking system.

The information will be transmitted to a central database, where it will be integrated with other local weather data and traffic observations, as well as details about road material and alignment. The processed data will then be used to update motorists in the area when hazards are present and, when appropriate, suggest alternate routes.

The incoming data would be anonymous. Officials are working on guidelines to allow drivers to opt out of the system for privacy considerations.

In addition to providing motorist warnings, such a system will alert emergency managers to hazardous driving conditions and enable state highway departments to efficiently keep roads clear of snow. It can also help meteorologists refine their forecasts by providing them with continual updates about local weather conditions.

Motor vehicle manufacturers plan to install the onboard equipment in every new vehicle sold in the United States within a few years as part of a voluntary program to improve driving safety.

On the prowl for bad weather

NCAR scientists and engineers are testing the weather piece of the system by collecting information from 11 specially equipped cars in the Detroit area. Test drivers are on the prowl for adverse conditions, especially heavy rain and snow. Engineers will analyze the reliability of the system by comparing data from the cars with other observations from radars and weather satellites. They will also look at whether different models of cars-in this case, Jeep Cherokees, Ford Edges, and a Nissan Altima – produce comparable measurements of weather and road conditions.

The tests, which began early this month and will run for about two weeks, will help the NCAR team refine its software to accurately process data from motor vehicles. In the future, the team also hopes to study which types of weather information will be most useful and how that information can be clearly and safely communicated to drivers, possibly through a visual display or audio alert.

One of the biggest challenges for NCAR is to determine how to process the enormous amounts of data that could be generated by about 300 million motor vehicles. The center has worked with the Department of Defense, the aviation industry, and other organizations to analyze complex weather observations. But the new system incorporates information from far more sources, and those sources are moving.

NCAR engineers are developing mathematical formulas and other techniques to accurately interpret the information and eliminate misleading indicators. If a driver, for example, turns on the windshield wipers in clear weather to clean the windshield, the NCAR data system will identify that action as an outlier rather than issuing a false alert about precipitation.

“It’s not enough to process the information almost instantaneously,” says William Mahoney, who oversees the system’s development for NCAR. “It needs to be cleaned up, sent through a quality control process, blended with traditional weather data, and eventually delivered back to drivers who are counting on the system to accurately guide them through potentially dangerous conditions.”

IntelliDrive is a service mark of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

JAKARTA, Indonesia – An Indonesian military plane carrying more than 100 people crashed into several homes and burst into flames Wednesday, killing at least 79 people, officials said.

Dozens were injured and more were feared dead, with local television flashing footage of fire engulfing the mangled wreckage. Black smoke billowed in the air, as soldiers carried badly burnt bodies on stretchers to waiting ambulances.

Air force spokesman Bambang Sulistyo said at least 79 people were killed when the C-130 Hercules crashed near a base in East Java province early Wednesday. There were 112 passengers and crew on board.

Military spokesman Sagom Tamboen said the aircraft was transporting troops and their families, including at least 10 children, when it tumbled from the sky near an air force base in East Java province.

It smashed into a row of houses in Geplak village, killing three on the ground, before skidding into a rice field.

The tail of the plane and several large parts of its charred body were scattered in the paddy and nearby bushes.

It was not clear what caused the crash, the latest in a string to hit the air force.

But several witnesses described hearing a large explosion while it was still in the air and then seeing it split apart.

“One of the wings fell off,” Agus Yulianto, a villager, was quoted as saying on the Web site of Kompas newspaper. “Then the plane nose-dived into the houses.”

The accident occurred 325 miles (520 kilometers) east of the capital, Jakarta.

The country’s air force has long complained of being underfunded and handicapped by a recently lifted U.S. ban on weapons sales. It has suffered a series of accidents, including a Fokker 27 plane that crashed into an airport hangar last month, killing all 24 onboard.

A series of commercial airline crashes in recent years has killed more than 120 people in Indonesia.

Tokyo, January 30, 2009: Today, Japan Airlines (JAL) became the first airline to conduct a demonstration flight using a sustainable biofuel primarily refined from the energy crop, camelina. It was also the first demo flight using a combination of three sustainable biofuel feedstocks, as well as the first one using Pratt & Whitney engines. The results of the flight are expected to conclusively confirm the second-generation biofuel’s operational performance capabilities and potential commercial viability.

The approximately one and half-hour demo flight using a JAL-owned Boeing 747-300 aircraft, carrying no passengers or payload, took off from Haneda Airport, Tokyo at 11:50am (JST). A blend of 50% biofuel and 50% traditional Jet-A jet (kerosene) fuel was tested in the No.3 engine (middle right), one of the aircraft’s four Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines. No modifications to the aircraft or engine were required for biofuel, which is a ‘drop-in’ replacement for petroleum-based fuel.

The JAL cockpit crew onboard the aircraft checked the engine’s performance during normal and non-normal flight operations, which included quick accelerations and decelerations, and engine shutdown and restart. A ground-based preflight test was conducted the day before the flight to ensure that the No. 3 engine functioned normally using the biofuel/ traditional Jet-A fuel blend. Captain Keiji Kobayashi who piloted the aircraft said, ‘Everything went smoothly. There was no difference at all in the performance of the engine powered by the biofuel blend, and the other three engines containing regular jet fuel.”

Data recorded on the aircraft will now be analyzed to determine if equivalent engine performance was seen from the biofuel blend compared to typical Jet A fuel. The initial analysis of the data will take several weeks and will be conducted by team members from Boeing, Japan Airlines, and Pratt& Whitney.

The biofuel component tested was a mixture of three second-generation biofuel feedstocks: camelina (84%), jatropha (under 16%), and algae (under 1%). Second-generation feedstocks do not compete with natural food or water resources and do not contribute to deforestation practices. The primary benefit of using biofuels in a commercial jetliner is their ability to reduce greenhouse gases throughout their entire lifecycle, while also helping to improve the environmental performance of commercial aviation and the planes that are flying today.

JAL Group President and CEO, Haruka Nishimatsu applauded the flight saying, “Today is an extremely important day for Japan Airlines, for aviation, and for the environment. The demonstration flight brings us ever closer to finding a ‘greener’ alternative to traditional petroleum-based fuel. When biofuels are produced in sufficient amounts to make them commercially viable, we hope to be one of the first airlines in the world to start powering our aircraft using them.”

Boeing Japan President, Nicole Piasecki said, “We are hopeful that within the next 3-5 years, commercial aircraft will begin flying revenue passenger flights using sustainable next-generation biofuels. There are remaining hurdles to overcome, including gaining the support of regulators, airports, fuel distributors and others, as well as increasing the production of environmentally and socially responsible fuel sources. Our industry is already working to secure its fuel future supply by establishing firm sustainability criteria to ensure that the environmental impacts and carbon dioxide emissions from biofuels are significantly lower than fossil fuel-based kerosene fuels.”

The fuel for the JAL demo flight was successfully converted from plant-based crude oil to biofuel, then blended with typical jet fuel by Honeywell’s UOP, a refining technology developer, using proprietary hydro-processing technology. Subsequent laboratory testing by Boeing, UOP, and several independent laboratories verified the biofuel met the industry criteria for jet fuel performance.

Jennifer Holmgren, General Manager of UOP Renewable Energy and Chemicals said, “We have proven that we can produce renewable jet fuel from sustainable resources that is a drop in replacement eliminating the need for costly changes to the fuels infrastructure and transportation fleet. This technology can be utilized to begin making an impact on the aviation fuel supply in as little as three years.”

“Ground-based jet engine performance testing last year by Pratt & Whitney of similar fuels further established that the biofuel blend either meets or exceeds the performance criteria that is in place for commercial aviation jet fuel today”, added Greg Gernhardt, Asia Pacific Region Vice President, Pratt & Whitney Commercial Engines & Global Services.

Sustainable Oils, Inc., a U.S.-based provider of renewable, environmentally clean, and high-value camelina-based fuels sourced the camelina used in the JAL demo flight. Terasol Energy sourced and provided the jatropha oil, and the algae oil was provided by Sapphire Energy. Nikki Universal, a joint venture of UOP and JGC, supplied the biofuel used in the flight, which had been produced in the U.S by UOP.

Also known as gold-of-pleasure or false flax, camelina is good candidate for a sustainable biofuel source, given its high oil content and ability to grow in rotation with wheat and other cereal crops. The crop is mostly grown in more moderate climates such as the northern plains of the U.S and Canada, and originally hails from northern Europe and Central Asia. Test plots are also underway in Malaysia, South Korea, Ukraine and Latvia.

“There are currently a few thousand acres under management, with an expectation of hundreds of thousands of acres within three years. Within 5 years, projections are for between 100 million and 200 million gallons of camelina-based sustainable jet fuel,” said Tom Todaro, CEO of Sustainable Oils.

A Boeing 737-800 of Turkish Airlines from Istanbul has crashed at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam with 135 passengers and crew on board while attempting to land. At least 9 people are dead, 86 injured of whom 25 critically. Three cockpit crew are dead.

The Boeing 737 is lying on its belly beyond a runway, inside a polder. Both engines broke off and are lying about 20 metres away from the plane. The wreckage pattern is small – indicating that it simply fell down, it did not slide. There has been no fire. Experts say it looks as though the pilot tried to make an emergency landing. Witnesses said it seemed to ‘just fall from the sky’ after it had slowed down to a very slow pace, its tail had touched the farm land first and then it just ‘fell down’ and broke into three sections.

Hero passenger:
One passenger Mustapha Bahcecioglu is apparently emerging as the big hero. He is a security expert at the Dutch railways and helped some 15 people, including children, from the plane, by crawling through the rear of the plane. He said there was no warning of any trouble, they just ‘slammed down into the field’. He said he saw ‘many people dead and badly injured’ which he could not help. The passengers were taken to a nearby barn of a farm where the triage medical personnel divided the passengers into two sections: badly injured and uninjured or slightly injured. He said the number of badly-injured passengers were many – ‘there was a lot of blood, a lot of crying, and doctors trying to save them.’ he told NOS news agency.

He felt as if he’d won the lottery’ by surviving unscathed. The plane had a lot of business people and vacationers on board, he said, including small children.

Many of the survivors had also crawled from the plane by themselves. The uninjured survivors were taken by buses to their relatives who were waiting at the airport and were being reunited at a nearby sports centre, Wildenhorst, in the nearby town of Badhoevedorp.

Schiphol ‘s runways are closed at the moment. Weather conditions can’t be blamed for the crash experts say: vision was clear, only a little bit hazy although overcast, and there is little wind. The NOS news agency of the Netherlands, says experts rate the airline as not having a good name in the aviation industry because it’s had a variety of hijackings and crashes.

Ambulances are parked on a nearby roadway because the newly-plowed farm fields are very wet. The nearby farm house has been set up as a triage emergency centre. from where ambulance personnel are taking the victims to the nearby ambulances. The plane has broken into three pieces at the rump and in the tail section, and an engine has broken away. A Turkish airlines spokesman said at least 50 passengers remained unharmed, according to the NOS news agency.

The plane crashed at 10:40 a.m. on February 25 in a polder next to the Polderbaan runway.
Passengers were seen to evacuate the plane, an eye witness said. This eye witness also said the plane crashed when it tried to land.

RTL-radio journalist Onno Beukers said the plane is lying just before the Schiphol Polderbaan runway near the A9 highway. An eye-witness told NOS TV news that the plane had been approaching this runway when it crashed into the polder. Some 20 ambulances are on the scene to provide medical help for 135 passengers, who had arrived from Turkey.

Benno Baksteen of Platform Aviation in the Netherlands says that judging from its position, it looks as if the plane attempted to make an emergency landing in the wet polder, which lies directly below the approach to the Polderbaan runway.

Schiphol airport has “difficult landing and take-off procedures because of the strict sound limitations,” he said, but Polderbaan is not known as a ‘difficult runway’.

Environmental activists on Monday urged the Jakarta Administration to temporarily halt its car-free days on selected city roads, saying a re-evaluation was needed because the event had failed to reduce air pollution and loose regulations have resulted in many violations, including those by senior officials.

“Legally, the car-free days cannot be stopped, but the city administration should halt them temporarily and conduct a review of what went wrong. Honestly, it’s been such a waste,” Selamet Daroyni, the executive director of the Jakarta branch of Indonesian Forum for the Environment, or Walhi, told a press conference.

Selamet said car-free days, generally on Sundays, had failed to achieve the short-term objective of minimizing air pollution and also had failed to encourage Jakarta residents to be more environmentally friendly and less dependent on cars.

“If we perceive this issue from the three success indicators, I’d say these events did not help much,” Selamet said.

He said the indicators were public participation, air pollution reduction and public obedience, including by government officials and law enforcers.

Ahmad Safrudin, of the Committee for Phasing Out Leaded Gasoline, said car-free days merely relocated traffic flow from one place to another without reducing air pollutants.

He said that a report by the Jakarta Environmental Management Board, or BPLHD, that air pollution has decreased significantly was unreliable.

“Jakarta has five air quality monitoring systems, but only one of them is working, so I doubt the report,” he said.

Ahmad said the inefficiency of car-free days had been proven by many violations, with some of the violators being government officials and policemen.

Responding to criticism, Rina Suryani, the BPLHD head of natural resources monitoring, said they had scientific measurements to prove that car-free days had in fact contributed significantly to air pollution reduction.

“In some parts of Jakarta, the air quality has gotten better because of this program,” she said.

Rina said the board could not enforce sanctions against violators because the 2005 bylaw enabling car-free days had not stipulated any.

Jakarta’s car-free days began in September 2007 and are held on the last Sunday of each month.